ADS 2011 Word of the Year

7 January 2012

This year it’s occupy, a worthy, but unsurprising choice. You can read the press release here.

This year, instead of just regurgitating the press release, I’ll give my comments on the various nominees and winners. These are my idiosyncratic opinions.

Occupy. As I said a worthy, albeit obvious, choice. Had I been in Portland, it would have gotten my vote.

Other WOTY nominees: FOMO “fear of missing out”: Not a bad acronym, and it characterizes a social phenomenon. But I’d never heard of it before the ADS vote. (Not that that necessarily means anything; just because I haven’t heard of a word doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t popular.) 99%: A worthy contender, but too closely associated with occupy, which is the more characteristic term for the movement. Humblebrag: a great word, but I’m not sure it’s really caught on, although I hope it has. Job creator: sorry, this one just doesn’t cut it. If there were a category for “most propagandistic,” this would make the cut, although 99% would probably be a better choice in that category.

The four “most useful” nominees are good ones, humblebrag, occupy, FOMO, and tablet. A tough choice. Any of these would be worthy. Although the utility of occupy is somewhat limited as it identifies a particular political movement. I can see the other three still being used in a non-historical context a decade from now.

Mellencamp is the clear choice for “most creative.” I’m surprised the didn’t pop up in previous years. Kardash would be my choice for runner-up. I don’t see what’s so especially creative about bunga bunga. It’s just an odd term used by Berlusconi which others picked up on. Put a bird on it is a fun choice, but derivative from a TV comedy sketch. I’m not sure it qualifies as creative—the sketch does, but the linguistic usage does not.

Anything associated with Charlie Sheen qualifies as “most unnecessary,” so I have no issue with bi-winning. But planking would be my choice; I prefer populist words. I’ve never heard of amazeballs; it clearly didn’t achieve the popularity that the other two did. The Qwikster service may have been unnecessary, but the word isn’t. Trade names are by their nature necessary. Linguists should know better than to confuse the word with the thing it represents.

Most years the “most outrageous” category yields some really offensive terms, but these are tepid at best. Assholocracy isn’t outrageous, unless one considers asshole to be so; impolite, yes; outrageous, no. Deather: again, confusing the thing with the word. Plus, the underlying concept isn’t all that outrageous. The circumstances around Bin Laden’s death and burial at sea raise some reasonable questions. (Not that I’m one with the deathers. I firmly believe that Osama was indeed killed, but skepticism of government announcements isn’t unreasonable.) Botoxionist? Not only have I not heard of it, but I don’t see anything at all outrageous about the word. And since it only got one vote, it seems I’m in the mainstream on this one.

Job creator for “most euphemistic” is a good choice and would have had my vote. Although I would have made regime alteration the runner up, not artisan/artisanal, which just barely qualifies as a euphemism. Sugar-coated Satan sandwich is a nice one, but appears to be a one-off usage.

Cloud and Arab Spring are both good choices for “most likely to succeed.” I’d have voted for cloud, as Arab Spring is likely to only be used historically in a few years. Tiger Mother is already on its way out, so I’m not sure what its doing in this category.

Brony and Tebowing are two good choices for “least likely to succeed.” (My apologies to my friends who are “My Little Pony” fans. This isn’t a judgment of you, just my assessment of the word’s long-term viability.) 9-9-9 has already failed, so I’m not sure it’s fair to include that one.

”Occupy words” was a good choice for a special category. (In most years the ADS will create a special category to recognize words associated with a particular trend.) The Occupy movement has been especially linguistically inventive, and it’s nice to see these words on the list.

Books Read, 2011

1 January 2012

The following is a list of books I read during the course of 2011. I’m not sure anyone else would be particularly interested, but I started keeping track of the books I read, so I figured I’d post the list.

Many are “classics” that were on the reading list for my PhD comprehensive exams. The asterisks indicate books I’ve read before, but re-read in 2011.

Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart
Atwood, Margaret, A Handmaid’s Tale
Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice
Bacon, Francis: various essays
Behn, Aphra, Oronooko
*Beowulf
Book of John Mandeville
Brand, Dionne, The Map to the Door of No Return
Cavendish, Margaret, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World
*Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales
*Conrad, Joseph, The Heart of Darkness
Croxton Play of the Sacrament, The
*Crystal, David, Stories of English
Defoe, Daniel, Moll Flanders
*Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol
*Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations
*Dickinson, Emily: various poems
*Donne, John: various poems
Eliot, George, Middlemarch
*Eliot, T. S.: various poems
Emerson, Ralph Waldo: various essays
Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews
Gay, John, Beggar’s Opera
Gray, Thomas: various poems
Herbert, George: various poems
*Hoccleve, Thomas, The Complaint
*Hoccleve, Thomas, The Dialogue
Johnson, Ben: various poems
Johnson, Samuel, Rasselas
Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
*Keats, John: various poems
Kingston, Maxine Hong, The Woman Warrior
Langland, William, Piers Plowman
Lanyer, Aemilia: various poems
Lyly, John, Gallathea
Macdonald, Ross, The Blue Hammer
Marlowe, Christopher, Dr. Faustus
Marlowe, Christopher, The Jew of Malta
Marvell, Andrew: various poems
*Melville, Herman, Moby Dick
Middleton, Thomas and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl
Middleton, Thomas, The Chaste Maid of Cheapside
Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman
Milton, John, Areopagitica
Milton, John, Paradise Lost
More, Thomas, Utopia
Morrison, Toni, Beloved
*Nabokov, Vladimir, Lolita
Pope, Alexander: various poems
Richardson, Samuel, Pamela
Shakespeare, William, 1 Henry IV
*Shakespeare, William, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
*Shakespeare, William, King Lear
*Shakespeare, William, Othello
Shakespeare, William, The Winter’s Tale
Shaw, Bernard, Major Barbara
Shaw, Bernard, Pygmalion
*Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein
*Sheridan, Richard, The School for Scandal
Sidney, Philip, The Defense of Poesy
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sterne, Laurence, A Sentimental Journey
*Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels
*Twain, Mark, Huckleberry Finn
*Whitman, Walt: various poems
Wilde, Oscar, Salome
Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire
Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts
Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway
*Wordsworth, William: various poems
Wycherley, William, The Country Wife
*Yeats, William Butler: various poems
York Cycle: various plays

Odamaki & Selection of Tradenames

1 January 2012

Languagehat has pointed me to an interesting blog on etymology, Odamaki. I’m adding it to my RSS feed. It looks like it will provide some good stuff, although it doesn’t appear to be updated all that often.

But someone is wrong on the internet, so I have to comment. Back in October Odamaki had a post on Nokia’s trade name Lumi, which in an obscure Spanish dialect means “prostitute.” Odamaki’s etymological commentary is accurate, but he makes the error that most such discussions make: failing to understand that the meanings of trade names simply don’t matter. It’s not a “mistake” to name a product that has a negative connotation. No one has ever shown that such a name has ever impacted sales of a product. I used to name products for a living, and I can tell you it doesn’t matter. (There are branding consultants that will tell you otherwise, but they are trying to peddle their services, so of course they will tell you that you need to hire them to spend many billable hours researching product names.)

Now, it is possible to name a product badly. No one would ever buy “Vomit” perfume, for example. But no marketing exec in their right mind would ever name a perfume “Vomit.” What we’re talking about here is subtle connotations that might slip past the normal brainstorming that occurs in a marketing department prior to a product launch.

Let’s look at some common cited examples of “badly” named products:

• The infamous urban legend of Chevy Novas not selling well in Mexico

• Coca-Cola allegedly meaning “bite the wax tadpole” in Chinese.

• Reebok’s line of Incubus sneakers, which had a successful sales run, but after production was halted when Reebok streamlined its product line, a local news outlet twigged to the demonic implications that no one had commented on before.

• The hugely successful Bimbo bakery. The giggling the name causes in its English-speaking markets doesn’t seem to have affected its sales.

• And my favorite, because I used to work there, is the graphic-chip maker NVIDIA, whose “envious” and “spiteful” name did not prevent them from growing to a $5 billion company in just ten years.

People are really good at processing polysemy. They recognize that word in one context does not necessarily mean the same in another. So if a name has subtle negative connotations in one context, those connotations are not going to carry over to the trade name. People may recognize the negative connotation, but if they do, they quickly discard it in the new context. This is a sub-case of the etymological fallacy. The origin of the word does not determine its meaning; its use does. What matters in a trade name is the brand reputation you build, not where the name comes from.

[This post was edited for clarity on 5 January 2012.]

Wordnik Gets Some Press

1 January 2012

The New York Times has an article on Wordnik, the online dictionary. But some the reporting, and even some of the commentary, provides the wrong impression, letting the reader believe that the process is entirely automated, done “without the arbiters.” It may be so on Wordnik’s part, but the databases on which it relies upon for its definitions have been populated by human lexicographers. Wordnik does not “pre-select and pre-prune,” as Erin McKean, one of Wordnik’s founders puts it, but the databases it relies on have been pre-selected and pre-pruned by others. Wordnik is a great resource, but not one I would recommend without some trepidation.

Now don’t get me wrong. I really like Wordnik. It has become my go-to dictionary when I need to quickly look up a word and don’t need the detailed info that the OED provides. It’s fast and provides a wealth of information, but it does require some sophistication to use it well. While I like it for my own use, I would be hesitant to recommend the site to my undergraduates.

First, it’s important to differentiate between the two main parts of a Wordnik entry, the definitions and the usage citations. For the definitions, Wordnik’s algorithms search and cull from various public domain or licensed dictionaries. These definitions are not “without arbiters,” rather the arbiters are one step removed. The definitions have all been created by human lexicographers, just not by ones employed by Wordnik. And because the sources are largely public domain, the definitions are mostly outdated. The American Heritage Dictionary, fourth edition, is more current that Webster’s 1913 or the Century Dictionary, both excellent dictionaries in their day but woefully outdated now, but even the AHD 4th isn’t the latest edition of that dictionary. Wordnik also often supplies definitions from Wiktionary or other web sources, which while current are of wildly varying accuracy. Having the old definitions is really useful, but the user must know that they can’t be relied upon for current usage.

The usage citations are better, and here the selection is truly done without human arbiters. But unlike traditional dictionaries, Wordnik does not usually provide a date for the citation. Many of the citations of “davenport,” to use the example quoted by Geoffrey Nunberg in the NY Times article, are from nineteenth-century novels found on Gutenberg.org. They are good citations, but you need to know the source in order to interpret them correctly. The site does not tell you, for instance, that Madeline Payne, The Detective’s Daughter, which it uses for three citations, was penned in 1883 and is not likely to represent current usage. Wordnik provides a link, so it’s easy to look the source up, but the user must be sophisticated enough to know that it’s important to click the link.

Wordnik does represent at least one way that dictionaries will go in the future, and as such it does represent the cutting edge of lexicography. But it is not truly “without arbiters” and it does need some work to make it friendly for the casual user, the person who just wants the answer and doesn’t know enough or want to ponder how the entry was constructed and how it should be interpreted.

The NY Times article also contains this amusing correction, at least for now. Once the editors discover it, I’m sure it will be corrected. But will they issue a correction to the correction?:

Correction: December 31, 2011

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of Wordnik’s cheif executive. He is Joe Hyrkin, not Joel.

Disclaimer: Erin McKean was editor of my book, Word Myths.

In Our Time: The Written Word

31 December 2011

Starting on 2 January 2012, Melvin Bragg’s radio show In Our Time will start a five-part series on the history of writing on BBC 4. The shows will also be available as podcasts.

Part 1: Technology and evolution of writing
Part 2: Invention of the codex (the book)
Part 3: Writing and religion
Part 4: Writing and literature
Part 5: Writing and science

The series is being produced in association with the British Library. You can read more about the manuscripts and books to be discussed on the show here.

In Our Time is one of the better radio shows/podcasts out there. I regularly listen to it. The show covers a wide range of topics relating to how our world came to be what it is, from Plato to quantum mechanics. As a result, it can be somewhat general and cursory, and experts in a particular subject will find fault with the shows, but few programs devote an hour to these topics and In Our Time does a rather good job all things considered. And Bragg is a good host, although he does tend to subscribe to the “great men” school of history and sometimes displays insufferably unreflective British nationalism. (Guests, for instance, should never suggest the industrial revolution was caused by anything other than the cleverness and ingenuity of the British people or Bragg will bring a wrath down upon them.)